Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
It’s my understanding, after thirty seconds of cursory research, that Warner Brothers gave director Joe Dante the keys to the kingdom for The New Batch. Dante wasn’t interested in another gremlins movie, the studio tried to proceed without him, nothing went anywhere, so they granted him the right to do whatever he wished with the property. The result is probably the most anarchic picture Joe Dante has ever made. The original Gremlins is a witty, surprisingly vicious mating of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and every monster movie Dante has ever seen. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is lighter, more self-aware (the outright horror dialed down), and even more insane. The pretense of human feeling, that leftover E.T. pathos that executive producer Spielberg always seems to instill (even, most ridiculously, in Transformers) has been dropped, any conventional three act structure discarded.
The New Batch sets itself a daunting task: to sustain the delirious, deranged cotton candy high of the first film at its best for the entire running time. This Dante picture, made at the height of an earlier wave of blockbuster testosterone fever, could cynically be reduced to the formula that was on all ambitious studio execs at the time. Dante had essentially given Warner Brothers Die Hard with Gremlins, or, more accurately, a tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. Or, even more accurately, an affectionate tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. The trick that Dante pulls in picture after picture is an affectionate, silly, satirical vibe that somehow manages tonal coherence. The New Batch fully plays to Dante’s strengths, a seemingly never ending trip-wire invention laced with an intoxicating love of movies that many don’t take too seriously.
One could draw parallels between The New Batch and Batman Returns, which seems to have been made under similar “the first for you, the second for me” circumstances, but the truth is, while the Burton films have an admirable personality that’s lacking in most expensive filmmaking, they don’t age that well. The New Batch mostly holds, melding a surreal, bent, soul consuming work environment that could have informed Office Space with a mischievous post-modern sensibility that precedes Tarantino’s later films by more than a decade. The picture even sports Christopher Lee before it was cool to cast Christopher Lee in anything beyond Hammer films.
The film, again like Batman Returns, seems to be an excuse for the filmmaker to unload all of the bric-a-brac that had probably been accumulating at the back of his mind for years. A likeable Trump daydream embodied by John Glover appears (though Dante’s goodwill doesn’t serve him here, Glover’s stoned Santa portrayal doesn’t jive with the cooperate hell the film has implied he created, the character should have closer resembled Glover’s shark in Scrooged); as well as a washed-up horror show host (Robert Prosky), harboring dreams of respectability, who lands a key interview with the talking “Brain” Gremlin (voiced, of course, by Tony Randall); we also get a spider gremlin; a bat gremlin (yes, the film elicits a laugh from a Batman parody); an electro-gremlin, and a starlet gremlin that is actually, and this is no mean feat, the ugliest of all the gremlins.
The film has the pleasure of a pinball machine, with Dante’s various hazards and inventions banging off one another in a series of vignettes of surprisingly even quality. It’s a testament to Dante’s mojo that he even ends his so-called children’s film on a triumphant note of bestiality without somehow compromising the overall good will of the endeavor.
I miss Joe Dante. He recently directed a doesn’t quite suck as much as the all others episode of Masters of Horror (though I didn’t see his second episode), and before that, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (that subtitle having the similarly inane on purpose ring of The New Batch), which, truthfully, I never caught either. Pauline Kael wrote, in a review of The Howling, that Dante seemed to be equal parts talent, amateur, style and flake. That’s precisely why his films are so engaging, he’s a talent with a child’s awe of genres many artists feel beneath them, capable of spinning his daydreams into an Americana rhapsody of monster-mania. Dante, similar to many of his characters, would seem to be an idealist from a past world, and I’m hoping that he hasn’t quite been swallowed yet. The horror film needs him. The comedy needs him. The bloated blockbusters could even use his teasing again, perhaps a third Gremlins, which I guess nowadays would be called something along the lines of G3. If anyone could make that idea tolerable it would be Joe Dante.
★★★½
